The Long Goodbye is the lackadaisically hip New Hollywood take on the hardboiled Raymond Chandler novel of the same name. It’s an LA noir, with the action transposed to the 1970s. It reimagines legendary Private Investigator Philip Marlowe as less of a grizzled lady killer, more a nonchalant card – even described at one point as a ‘loser’.
Like the similarly sun-blushed Chinatown (released a year later in 1974), it’s a fabulous fusion of old and new Hollywood. Directed by one of the American New Wave’s most significant talents, Robert Altman, it’s written by Leigh Brackett, the co-writer of 1946’s The Big Sleep, in which Marlowe was played, seemingly definitively, by Humphrey Bogart.
As its thoroughly modern Marlowe The Long Goodbye stars one of the ’70s most coolly charismatic stars, Elliot Gould, alongside ’50s Hollywood icon Sterling Hayden. It contains impersonations of some of the greats of the earlier era (Barbara Stanwyck, Jimmy Stewart) courtesy of an eccentric security guard (Ken Sansom).
The Long Goodbye opens (and indeed closes) with a rousing blast of ‘Hooray for Hollywood’, the signature tune of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the Academy Awards, which is actually a deeply satirical song whose sometimes caustic content is generally ignored (“where any shop girl can be a top girl, if she pleases the tired businessman”).
Despite the appropriate cynicism, the jollity and old school associations are in sharp contrast to what follows, as we’re immediately transported into more laconic, lounge jazz-flanked ’70s environs. It’s three am and Marlowe (Gould) lies sleeping in bed, where he is awoken by his hungry cat. After his attempt to fob off the savvy creature with cream cheese dashed with salt (unsurprisingly) fails he’s forced to head out.
In picturesque-style, Marlowe lives opposite a group of exhibitionist hippy chicks, who frequently cavort bare-breasted outside their pad; as he leaves his apartment one of them coos a request at him for brownie mix and complements him on his neighbourliness. After he returns from the supermarket with inferior brand cat food his disgusted cat flounces off through the makeshift cat-flap (merely a crack in a window, amusingly labelled “El porto del gato”).
As you’d expect, Marlowe quickly finds himself embroiled in a mystery. His friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), who he has unquestioningly helped flee to Tijuana, is suspected of brutally murdering his wife. To compound matters, a group of gangsters, fronted by the slithering, unpredictable Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) are in pursuit of a large sum of money which Terry has seemingly absconded with.
Taking on a seemingly unrelated case introduces Marlowe to the Wades: successful author and inveterate alcoholic Roger (Sterling Hayden) and his glamorous wife Eileen (Nina van Pallandt).
In his interpretation of the tough, pulpy material, Altman brings to the table a riveting freshness, a freewheeling naturalism but with a playful air. Marlowe is never short of a cute crack and the sequences where he tangles with the crooks contain plenty of humour (as well as one shocking act of violence); at one point Marlowe mischievously furnishes his planned destination to an incompetent hoodlum who’s supposed to be following him.
The repeated use of the John Williams and Johnny Mercer composed title song is the film’s most obviously playful element. It appears in a number of unlikely and entertaining guises both diegetic and non-diegetic: it constantly forms the basis of the score and there are oddly coincidental appearances of various versions on the radio, a live performance of it in Marlowe’s favourite bar, and it even turns up accompanying a funeral parade in Mexico.
The Long Goodbye is a breezily rebellious and enormously likable neo noir. Played with panache by Gould, this version of Marlowe is one cool customer: blithely dapper, he’s an unflappable man of admirable morality. In his slow sonorous drawl, he’s forever making wisecracks to those he encounters and, more oddly, to himself as he casually rolls.
Cult Film Club – The Long Goodbye (text) by Emma Simmonds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
